Did Abraham Lincoln Have a “Schizoid Manic Personality”?

Is psychohistory—the telling of history utilizing psychological and primarily psychoanalytic insights—a valid psychological technique? While the answer to the question isn’t clear, there is no doubt that psychoanalyzing notable figures from the past (and the present) has often caused quite a stir, revealing our sensitivity about having the inner minds of famous people exposed.

For more than a century, leading psychoanalysts have found Freud’s theories a powerful way to paint a compelling portrait of a well-known person. Freud himself used psychohistory (or applied psychoanalysis, as it was also called) in his 1910 biography of Leonardo da Vinci (“the excessive tenderness of his mother had the most decisive influence on the formation of his character and his later fortune,” he wrote of the genius), and Erik Erikson’s two works of psychohistory, Young Man Luther and Gandhi’s Truth, were considered the best of the genre.

In her 1924 The Re-creating of the Individual, Beatrice Hinkle borrowed Jung’s psychological types to analyze historical figures and even nations, an interesting and, she believed, useful application of psychoanalytic theory. Had people at the time recognized that Teddy Roosevelt was the perfect extravert and Woodrow Wilson the quintessential introvert, she wrote, they could have anticipated many of the decisions made by the men and, perhaps, helped make the world a more peaceful place.

A.A. Brill, the NYU professor who had the weighty task of translating Freud’s books from German into English, also liked to use historical figures to illustrate personality types of his own design. For Brill, George Washington, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, and Woodrow Wilson were all “schizoids,” while Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Warren G. Harding, and Benjamin Franklin were “syntonics.”

Schizoids, Brill explained at the 1924 American Psychiatric Association convention, were independent and at times confrontational, while syntonics were social and cooperative. While one could quibble with Brill’s classifications (Did Teddy Roosevelt really have a “sunny disposition,” as he attributed to syntonics?), the course of history was heavily determined by the personality types of a country’s leaders, Brill suggested, an intriguing application of psychology not just circa mid-1920s but even today.

Brill went further with psychohistory at the 1931 American Psychiatric Association convention when he gave a paper called “Lincoln as a Humorist.” President Lincoln and other past presidents had already been posthumously psychoanalyzed, but Brill took psychohistory to a new level with his reading of the Great Emancipator.

Lincoln was, now according to Brill, a “schizoid manic personality,” suffering from what we would today call bipolar disorder. Brill stopped short of calling Lincoln insane, a good decision in retrospect given the ruckus he caused with his already contentious diagnosis. “Two contrasting natures struggled within him,” Brill argued; Lincoln’s dark side was inherited from his brute of a father while his light side derived from his cheerful, affectionate mother. The president’s habit of telling the occasional dirty joke was an outlet for his “sexually aggressive” personality, Brill added—this, too, something that definitely did not endear him or psychoanalysis in general to those already suspect of the field.

One man particularly irked by Brill’s necro-analysis was another notable psychiatrist, Jacob Moreno, previously of Vienna. Psychoanalysis simply had not developed to the point where such claims could be made, Moreno countered; the fact that everything we knew about Lincoln was based on second-hand stories was another thing that made Brill’s theory highly specious. Brill would be perfectly justified to draw his own conclusions had Lincoln been psychoanalyzed and his case documented for posterity but, because the rail-splitter from Illinois died some 30 years before Breuer’s and Freud’s Studies in Hysteria, Brill was way out of bounds.

Four decades later, psychohistory remained seen by some to offer an ideal set of concepts by which to analyze complex, controversial figures of the day. Bruce Mazlish, a historian at MIT, for example, had written psychohistories of both Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. David Abrahamsen, a New York psychoanalyst, had also written a psychohistory of Nixon, as the ex-president’s personality profile was apparently too juicy to resist. “His self was splintered, broken, but many pieces of his personality still hung together,” wrote Abrahamsen in his Nixon Vs Nixon (An Emotional Tragedy), adding that the man “was not a whole person.”

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While no doubt controversial, psychohistory offers an intriguing application of psychological principles to try to better understand the minds of influential individuals.